The How to series · Post 17
How much of Monday is viewing-to-application chasing
For UK letting agents with a small team: the gap between a viewing and an application costs about 100 minutes of chasing every week, and Monday is where it lands.
It's 9:15am on a Monday. Saturday filled the diary and the inbox has filled itself since: viewing requests to slot in, applications from last week's viewings still not back, two tenants waiting on documents they were asked for days ago, and an applicant asking whether anyone has read theirs.
Nobody is being slow. There's just a gap between viewing done and application in, and the morning goes into it.
That's the loop this post is about: viewing-to-application chasing. Someone texts, waits, chases, waits again, then asks out loud whether anyone has heard anything.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
- 5 minutes of chase per viewing (the text, the wait, the follow-up text, the document nudge)
- × 20 viewings a week = 100 minutes a week
- × £30 an hour = £50 a week
- × 46 working weeks = about £2,300 a year
That's 76 hours, nearly two working weeks a year, spent asking people to do what they already said they'd do. If your real number is 2 minutes a viewing, it's still about £900 a year. At 8 minutes it's past £3,500. Swap in your own figures. The shape holds.
Score it: the three checks
The same three checks we use everywhere:
- Hours. How much of the week it eats (0 to 5)
- Repeat. Could a new starter follow it from one page? (0 to 5)
- Risk-if-wrong. If it slips once, how bad? (0 to 5. High means the rules are obvious and a slip is recoverable)
Viewing-to-application chasing scores Hours 3 (100 minutes, concentrated into one morning, which is why it feels heavier than the maths says), Repeat 4 (the messages are standard: a viewing slot, a document request, a reminder, a nudge before the deadline, and a new starter could follow the pattern from one page), Risk-if-wrong 4 (a clumsy reminder is caught at approval, and the worst case is an awkward sentence, not a lost applicant).
Two checks at 4 or more: start narrow. Step one is the document chase, because it repeats hardest and says the same thing every time.
Try one thing this week (free)
On Monday, put a sheet of paper by the desk and tally every chase the team makes between a viewing and a completed application. On Friday, multiply the tally by 5 minutes and by your hourly rate. Then count the other number: how many of last Saturday's viewings have an application in by Friday. Those two numbers together tell you whether this loop deserves a proper look.
Where a person stays
Software can hold the list and draft the nudges, because the messages are standard and the timing is written on one page. A person approves whatever goes out, every time. The judgement stays human permanently: who gets the tenancy, how a reference reads, what to do with an applicant who's nearly there but not quite, and when to chase and when to wait. Software prepares the asking. People make the decisions. That line doesn't move for chasing.
FAQ
Usually neither. The step between viewing done and application in has no owner, so it runs on memory. A chase that happens when somebody remembers isn't a process. It's luck with a calendar.
A plain reminder that says what's needed and by when reads as organised, and most people prefer it to silence. Nothing goes out unchecked, so tone stays human. The odd case gets handled by an actual person.
If they're going out on time, part of this loop is already handled. Good. What usually stays manual is the chasing between steps: the document that was promised, the application that stalled after the viewing. The software holds the diary. The gap is the words in between.
No. The machine asks. People decide. Anything that offers someone a home, or turns one down, stays with a person permanently. The machine's part is the asking, and the asking is the part that eats the morning.
It's a sketch, so test it. Time Monday's chases and use your own number. The free count in this post exists because a guessed 5 and a real 2 produce different answers, and the real one is the only one worth planning around.